'Gene Police' Raise
Farmers Fears

Rick Weiss /
Washington Post 3feb99

BRUNO, Saskatchewan - On a cold January
morning in central Canada, Percy Schmeiser looks over his frozen fields.
"Here's where all the trouble began," he says, pointing to here
private investigators last year arrived uninvited and snipped samples of his
crops for DNA tests.

Schmeiser, 68, has been farming these fertile acres
all his life, growing canola for the valuable oil in its seeds. And as farmers
have done for thousands of years, he has saved some seeds from each year's
harvest to replant his fields the following season. Now, he says, "for
doing what I've always done," he is being sued by agribusiness giant
Monsanto Co. in a landmark "seed piracy" case. The outcome could
influence how much control biotechnology companies will have over the world's
food supply in the next millennium, and is highlighting a major source of
friction as the genetic revolution spills into the world of agriculture.

Schmeiser is one of hundreds of farmers in the
United States and Canada who stand accused by Monsanto of replanting the
company's patented, gene-altered seeds in violation of a three-year-old company
rule requiring that farmers buy the seeds fresh every year. He vehemently denies
having bought Monsanto's seeds, saying pollen or seeds must have blown onto his
farm, possibly from a neighbor's land. It's the company, Schmeiser says, that
ought to be rebuked for its pattern of "harassment."

Besides sending Pinkerton detectives into farmers'
fields, the company sponsors a toll-free "tip line" to help farmers
blow the whistle on their neighbors and has placed radio ads broadcasting the
names of noncompliant growers caught planting the company's genes. Critics say
those tactics are fraying the social fabric that holds farming communities
together.

"Farmers here are calling it a reign of
terror," Schmeiser says. "Everyone's looking at each other and asking,
'Did my neighbor say something?' "

Cases like Schmeiser's are also raising alarms
within organizations that deal with global food security. That's because
three-quarters of the world's growers are subsistence farmers who rely on saved
seed.

"This is a very alien and threatening concept
to farmers in most of the world," said Hope Shand, research director of
Rural Advancement Foundation International, an international farm advocacy group
based in Pittsboro, N.C. "Our rural communities are being turned into
corporate police states and farmers are being turned into criminals."

Monsanto representatives say the company must
strictly enforce the "no replant" policy to recoup the millions of
dollars spent developing the seeds and to continue providing even better seeds
for farmers. Already, they say, the new varieties are improving farmers'

yields and profits and allowing them to abandon
extremely toxic chemicals in favor of more environmentally friendly ones. A
newer generation of engineered seeds, now under development, promises to produce
food with enhanced nutritional value, providing a potential boon for the world's
malnourished masses.

"This is part of the agricultural revolution,
and any revolution is painful. But the technology is good technology," said
Karen Marshall, a spokeswoman for Monsanto in St. Louis.

Developing Products

A visit to Monsanto's 210-acre biotechnology
complex, 25 miles west of St. Louis, offers ample evidence of how difficult and
expensive it is to develop new and useful varieties of gene-altered seeds.

It is the largest biotechnology research center in
the world, featuring 250 separate laboratories, 100 room-sized plant growth
chambers whose climates can be controlled from researchers' home computers if
necessary, and two acres of greenhouses arrayed on the main building's enormous
rooftop.

It was here that company scientists took a gene
from a bacterium that produces an insect-killing toxin called "Bt" and
transferred it to corn, cotton and other crops to make plants that exude their
own insecticide. Here too, researchers gave crops a gene that allows them to
survive Monsanto's flagship weed killer, Roundup, which normally kills

them.

Monsanto estimates that it takes 10 years and about
$300 million to create commercial products such as these. For every new kind of
engineered seed that makes it to field trials, 10,000 have failed somewhere
along the development pipeline, officials say. To recover this huge investment,
the company has opted not to sell its engineered seeds in the traditional sense
but to "lease" them, in effect, for one-time use only - and to go
after anyone who breaks the rules.

Suing one's own customers "is a little
touchy," Marshall conceded. But after going to so much trouble to build a
better seed, "we don't want to give the technology away." It wasn't
always this way. Until about a decade ago, crop and seed development in the
United States and abroad was mostly a government business. The Department of
Agriculture, in conjunction with the nation's land grant colleges and local
agricultural extension agents, developed, tested and distributed new varieties
of seeds, asking nothing more of citizens than that they pay their taxes. Under
that system, patents were infrequently pursued and rarely enforced. And seed
saving and trading were commonplace.

That began to change in the 1980s when Congress
passed legislation, including the Bayh-Dole Amendment, that encouraged federal
agencies to cooperate more closely with the private sector. In agriculture, that
meant private seed companies could profit handsomely by selling seeds that were
developed in large part with taxpayer dollars. Today, a handful of American and
European agricultural companies control a major portion of the world's certified
food seed supply.

Monsanto is the king of them all. Its gene
alterations can be found in hundreds of crop varieties sold under license by
many seed companies. And the total acreage devoted to gene-altered crops has
increased astronomically since the first varieties were approved in 1996. This
year, about half of the 72-million-acre U.S. soybean harvest is expected to be
genetically engineered to tolerate Monsanto's Roundup. More than half of the 13
million acres of U.S. cotton will be engineered as well, as will be about 25
percent of the nation's 80 million acres of corn, either for Roundup resistance
or to exude Bt.

"Farmers are going bonkers for these
crops," said William Kosinski, a Monsanto biotechnology educator.
"They've been very well received." Although there are lingering
concerns that in the long run genetically engineered crops could end up hurting
the environment, the company argues that they could actually help. In one small
study, the reduced use of pesticides with engineered plants appears to have
resulted in increased survival of beneficial insects, which eat insect pests and
serve as food for struggling songbird populations.

Tim Seifert and Ted Megginson are farm neighbors in
Auburn, Ill., about 100 miles northeast of St. Louis. Between the two of them
they farm about 4,400 acres,

mostly soybeans and corn, and they will vouch for
the quality of Monsanto's genes.

For the past two years, all 1,200 acres of
Seifert's soybean fields have been planted with Monsanto's herbicide-tolerant
Roundup Ready brand, and about half his other 1,200 acres are now devoted to the
company's Bt-exuding "YieldGard" corn. Megginson started using Roundup
Ready soybean seed last year, and both say they have obtained good yields while
using fewer toxic chemicals.

"It's made me a better farmer," Seifert
said, warming his hands in Megginson's small, barn-side office. Most important,
Seifert estimates he saved $5 to $6 an acre last year in reduced labor and
pesticide costs.

But when conversation turns to the restrictions
that come along with Monsanto's seed, Seifert and Megginson confess to being
less than enthused. One irritation is the "Technology Use Agreement,"
which not only demands that farmers not save seed but also gives Monsanto the
right to come onto their land and take plant samples for three years after the
seeds are last purchased.

"Farmers don't like to sign anything,"
Seifert said, especially anything that gives up their rights to stop
trespassers. "I have to admit, I balked a little."

But what has really irritated farmers has been
Monsanto's aggressive efforts to track down seed savers, such as the company's
widely advertised toll-free "tip line." "Nobody likes to think
that your neighbor is getting away with something while you are doing it on the
uppity up, but we're all neighbors, too," Seifert said. In heated
discussions at local farm meetings, he said, "the majority of farmers felt
like they wouldn't squeal on each other."

Megginson and Seifert were also taken aback by the
radio ads that Monsanto aired during the fall soybean harvest in which the
company named farmers who had been caught saving seed - ads the company calls
"educational" and others call "intimidating."

One of those named farmers is David Chaney, who
farms about 500 acres near Reed, Ky. Chaney admitted to replanting some of
Monsanto's engineered soybean seed and trading some to other farmers in the
area.

He settled with Monsanto, paying the company
$35,000 and signing an agreement that forbids him from criticizing the company.
"I wish I could tell you the whole story," he said. "Legally they
are right. But morally, that's something else altogether. Mostly I wish I'd
bought their stock instead of their seed."

Perhaps most bothersome, he said, is knowing that
someone he knows probably turned him in. "I hope I never know who," he
said. It's possible that no one turned Chaney in, because another of Monsanto's
methods for catching seed pirates is to conduct random DNA tests on plants
growing in the fields of farmers who have bought its seed in previous years.

The company has hired full-time Pinkerton
investigators and, north of the border, retired Canadian Mounted Police, to deal
with the growing work load - a total now of more than 525 cases, about half of
which have been settled. The company won't reveal details, but many of the
settlements have been in the range of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars
each, and a settlement in the millions is expected soon, said Lisa Safarian,
Monsanto's intellectual property protection manager.

The company has decided that the risk of alienating
some farmers is more than offset by the benefit of being able to promise "a
level playing field" for the vast majority of honest customers, Safarian
said. Besides, she said, the money is going to a good cause: a Monsanto-created
scholarship fund to help the children of farmers go to college.

Rounding Up Evidence

But what about Schmeiser, who never bought
engineered seeds from Monsanto, and never signed a grower agreement? According
to some experts, his predicament suggests that Monsanto's policies could affect
many more people than just its customers. It was a Friday in July when he got a
call from a local Monsanto representative. "We have heard a rumor that you
are growing Roundup Ready Canola on your farm," the man said.

"I thought, 'Oh boy!'," Schmeiser said.

Schmeiser stands as straight as a silo and is not
easily intimidated. He was the mayor of Bruno for 17 years, and for five years
was a member of the Saskatchewan legislative assembly. "I've seen a lot of
politics," he says. "But I've never seen a situation to create hard
feelings and divide people as what I'm seeing now."

The man from Monsanto asked Schmeiser for
permission to test his plants. Schmeiser refused, so the company sampled some
plants on a public right-of-way near his fields. Some of those apparently tested
positive for Monsanto's gene, because a judge subsequently provided a court
order allowing the company to take plants from Schmeiser's property.

The problem, Schmeiser says, is there's a lot of
plants in the area with Monsanto's gene in them. Roundup Ready pollen from other
farmers' fields is blowing everywhere in the wind, he says, and he's seen big
brown clouds of canola seed blowing off loaded trucks as they speed down the
road around harvest time - spilling more than enough to incriminate an innocent
farmer.

Back near his house, Schmeiser points to a wild
canola plant poking out of the snow near the base of a telephone pole. "I
sprayed Roundup around these poles twice last summer to control weeds," he
says. How is it, he asks, that this canola plant survived?

Inside his modest, tidy home, he pulls out
agricultural articles documenting many instances of Roundup Ready canola
cross-pollinating with normal canola. Monsanto has a problem, says Terry J.
Zekreski, Schmeiser's attorney in Saskatoon: It's trying to own a piece of
Mother Nature that naturally spreads itself around. Ray Mowling, a vice
president for Monsanto Canada in Mississauga, agrees that some cross pollination
occurs, and acknowledges the awkwardness of prosecuting farmers who may be
inadvertently growing Monsanto seed through cross-pollination or via innocent
trades with patent-violating neighbors. Nonetheless, he said, the company
considers Schmeiser's "a critical case" to win if it hopes to protect
its patent rights beyond its immediate circle of paying customers.

Killing a Cash Cow

Some say Monsanto could have done things
differently. Berlin-based AgrEvo, for example, also sells engineered canola in
Canada yet has chosen not to place restrictions on seed use. Its plan is to make
money on its herbicide, Liberty, rather than on its Liberty-tolerant seeds. The
more seeds sold, blown or given away, the better.

Monsanto, however, does not have that option. The
U.S. patent on Roundup is on the verge of expiring, which means cheap generics
will soon kill the company's 20-year-old cash cow. Monsanto will have to profit
from Roundup-tolerant seeds, rather than from Roundup itself.

Representatives of other U.S. seed companies have
taken a few potshots at Monsanto for how it has handled its war on piracy.
Privately, though, they express relief that patent protection is Monsanto's
problem, not theirs.

In a few years Monsanto may have a technical
solution to its problem. The company is buying the commercial rights to a
package of genes, developed in part by the federal government, that has come to
be known as "Terminator." When inserted into seeds, the genes ensure
that the resulting plants will never produce seeds of their own. While the
system could solve forever the seed piracy problem, it has already come under
heavy fire from farmers and international agronomic groups because of its
potential to starve subsistence farmers of the renewable seed they need. In any
case, Terminator technology is not expected to be available commercially until
2005.

In Monsanto's view, there is no crisis today:

Farmers can simply decide whether its seeds are
worth the legal baggage they carry. And indeed, many farmers have already voted
"yes" with their wallets.

"We're not doing this [farming] for a hobby.
We're looking for net dollars," said Megginson, the Illinois farmer who has
begun using Monsanto's genes. "They're not holding a gun to my head to make
me buy their seeds."

Then again, that didn't help Schmeiser. He and
others say they can't help but wonder whether high-tech agriculture - and the
escalating war over seed patent rights - may ultimately rob farmers of the one
thing they have historically cherished the most: The freedom to work their land
as they wish.

"Every year I get catalogues from the seed
salesmen, and more and more varieties have the Roundup Ready gene even though I
don't need it," said Vincent Moye, a farmer in Reinbeck, Iowa. "The
government's looking at Microsoft too hard. This is a bigger monopoly. We're all
gonna be serfs on our own land."

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